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Spray Tans

Monday, March 13, 2017

I’m either not as good at being
who I think I am, or I’m way better—
so much so that I almost no longer
recognize the person I once was
as being connected, via the present,
to the man I hope, one day, to be.
And if that’s the case, either

neither are you or so are you,
but even more so. It’s a matter
of degrees—and also of Degree
Dry Protection Antiperspirant
Deodorant, and maybe also of Attilio
Degrassi, Italian scholar of Latin
epigraphy. No, I threw that last

one in as an example of a false
positive. One mustn’t simply
assume one’s beta virgin, pimply
and spry, can step naturally into
the rainbows of tomorrowland!
One’s too familiar with sorrow, and
one doesn’t enjoy time, per se.

At least not what it does to May
or to its moons as it lapses,
however confidently, into false June.
What I’m saying, however clunkily,
is that I resent the way time redacts
its many months, however funkily,
giving rise to a lone apocalypse

of singular sun and million Satans
springing for—well, spray tans,
let’s be honest. They don’t call it
the Yellow Devil for nothing.
They don’t call it “Honey Darling”
for no reason at all. It’s because
it got that way at the mall.